


A Flying Six-Fingered Man From Outer Space Destroyed Our Shed!

by amadscientistapproaches



Series: The Doctor (Times Twelve) [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: (un)resolution, Based off the Doctor Who episode The Eleventh Hour because I love that episode, Doctor Who AU, Don’t copy to another site, Gen, I did actually try to write with horror undertones, I have not written a single fic that has not been an AU, Many Disasters, Mention of Stan Pines and mysteries besides, Unintentional home invasion that Dipper handles with his usual efficiency, and I don't plan on breaking that streak anytime soon, creepy creepy housey wouse, eyyy, hurt but heartwarming and hopeful, the Mystery Shack as the TARDIS, timey wimey oopsie whoopies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-04
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-04-07 17:24:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19089655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amadscientistapproaches/pseuds/amadscientistapproaches
Summary: His head hurts and is probably on fire, along with everything else.Something is gone and shouldn't be and something else shouldn't be here.The house that the pair of twins in front of him inhabit holds much more than it seems...





	A Flying Six-Fingered Man From Outer Space Destroyed Our Shed!

**Author's Note:**

> I finished writing this ages ago but I was determined to try and finish one of my WIPs before I posted it... since uni and exams and SO MUCH is going on and it's rare enough that I get to write anyway, I decided whatever. No sense in not showing what I /do/ have.

 

“Hey Mason, how’s this one sound?” Mabel asked from her position flat on her stomach, the eyebrows on her little face scrunched up in critical consideration of her own big, careful writing.

She cleared her throat.

“Dear God-”

“You don’t haveta write out prayers, Mabel,” her brother interrupted immediately, lying on his back on the lower bunk-bed and squeezing a fluffy purple rabbit between his fingers.

“Well then why’s there heaps of siddurs in our house?” Mabel countered. “Plus the Torah, and _My First Prayer Book_ , and-”

“The Torah’s not really a prayer book,” said Mason, but there was touch of uncertainty in his young voice.

“Yeah it is,” said Mabel stubbornly. “’S a book. With people prayin’ in it.”

Mason didn’t seem to be able to fault that logic, and let it go with an, “Okay,”

Mabel cleared her throat again.

“Dear God,

“Were you just asleep? Sorry if you were asleep. I didn’t wanna wake you, but I promise it’s a ‘mergency. There’s… a crack in our wall,”

Here, her chirpy little tone wavered noticeably. Mason stilled his fiddling with the toy. Like it was drawn with a wire, his head turned to look at The Wall.

A jagged, winding crack zigged and zagged through the plaster. It arched upward slightly, like it was imitating a crooked grin. However, he and Mabel hadn’t dared to put googly eyes above it.

They already felt like they were being watched enough.

Mason swallowed, not seeming to want to look away now that he was staring at it. Mabel’s eyes, already squeezed shut in concentration, screwed up tighter. The small fingers of her clasped hands were going white.

“It, like… talks’n stuff…”

The script she had written out on paper had run out.

Like she hadn’t been able to find the words.

“So, can you send someone to fix it? That would be greeeaat. Okay, that’s all, talk to ya later!” She finished brightly, springing up to feet and dusting her hands of with a pleased expression, content in the knowledge of a job well done.

Mason remained very still, staring at The Wall.

“I don’t think anyone else’s coming, Mabel,” he said, very quietly.

_Anyone else._

It should have implied that there was someone who they _had_ told about the crack. But there wasn’t.

No one had existed for them to tell about it.

“Mason, d’you hear that?” Mabel asked, puzzled, sticking a finger in her ear and wiggling it around.

A sound that was a cross between a whine and a roar, like the distant scream of a jet engine at full power, was steadily rising in pitch.

And becoming louder.

The pyjama’d kids looked at each other with wide eyes just as an almighty crash came from their front yard – not unlike a shed being flattened.

□

“See Mason, I _told_ you he’d send someone!”

“Hello? Is anyone in there?”

“This is so COOL!”

Two young voices were the first sensations to fight their way through Ford’s mind – besides the warning tolls of the cloister bell, that was. And the acrid smell of smoke. And the heat of various fires burning all around the console room. The armchair was completely ablaze. He hoped the axolotl’s tank had survived.

So, to rephrase: the sound of the two young voices were _among_ the first sensations to assault Ford on his way to consciousness. Or, if not the first, then they were still at least assaulting him. His head ached.

He found a surface that wasn’t searing hot and dragged himself to his feet, barely able to see through watering eyes, black smoke, heat hazes, and the flashing purple and yellow lights sparking like small suns against his retinas.

That last one was probably not the TARDIS malfunctioning.

Ford stumbled towards the general direction of a door. His boots sizzled.

_It’s fine. This is fine. It’s not the first time you’ve crashed a burning spaceship into Earth._

_Not even the tenth time, really._

The bolt on the door slipped out of place easier than it ever had, like the ship was trying to eject him itself. The door burst open and he practically flew out, tumbling off the porch and face-planting neatly into dirt and grass.

Correction: the TARDIS _definitely_ wanted him out.

Ford spat out soil and at least one leaf and became momentarily convinced that he’d gone blind upon pushing himself to his hands and knees.

The cool night air of – he breathed in, letting the scents of the wind, shrubbery and nearby surroundings wash over him – Oregon, USA, Earth, Dimension 38:! was a stark contrast to the burning insides of his ship. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw two kids holding a large flashlight between them, jaws dropped and eyes wide. They looked similar enough to be twins…

Something prodded insistently at his memory. Something person-shaped. Something _missing._ There hadn’t been someone else in the TARDIS, had there? No, there couldn’t have been. Though the last hour or so was fairly chaotic and scrambled in his memories, surely he would have noticed another person with him? There had been explosions, and tumbling, and falling, and malfunctions all over the place – _he’d_ barely survived as it was, a human definitely wouldn’t have… so there couldn’t have been anyone else. Yes.

There was still a big blank space in his memory among all that frantic confusion.

“Are you okay?” asked one of the kids. Despite the thick bobble-hat ensuring that any colds or flu were doomed in their siege against it, fluffy brown curls stubbornly worked their way out from under its grasp. He and his sister – wrapped equally warmly in a sweater – looked about six years old.

That was when the first warning bell went off in his head. Although, he was still pretty stunned from that last collision with the console: it could just be his ringing head.

The kids looked at each other worriedly. Ford realised he should probably reply and stop staring sightlessly.

“Yes, I’m fine,” he said hurriedly. He tried to stand up but tipped over halfway, staggered for a few steps feeling like the rest of his body was being dragged around by his head, and fell back onto his knees again.

“Uh huh,” said the girl, looking sceptical. “Um, you’re bleeding. But it’s a nice red,” she added optimistically.

His head really _was_ sore. That would make sense.

“Well, we can’t all be perfect,” Ford said dazedly.

“Are you an alien?!” Gasped the boy suddenly, looking from the trail of smoke in the sky, to the ship, to Ford, and back again.

“I’m as human as you are – as long as you’re not human. Are you human?” He peered at them. Gosh, it was hard to think.

The kids couldn’t have looked more excited if he’d doused them in waffles and ice cream. Food. Yes. He needed food.

“Is that your spaceship?!”

“Mystery Shack,” the boy read off the TARDIS’s camouflage circuits. “It’s a house! You fly a house?!”

“A big flying wooden house!” shrieked the girl, beaming.

“He crushed our shed!”

“He crushed our _shed!_ ”

They didn’t look upset at all about that, bouncing up and down and turning the torch into a strobe light as they were, but Ford apologised anyway.

“And he’s here to make the crack stop!” the girl continued.

Another warning bell.

“Crack?” Ford repeated.

“Yeah, there’s this crack in our room-” said the boy giddily.

“-And you’re gonna fix it it-”

“-And it’s gonna go away-”

“-And it’s gonna be okay because God sent us a broken shack and a bleeding, burning man!”

 _What_ was going on?

Ford held up a hand to stop the flood, trying to piece together the gabbled words. It proved too much to take in, and another stab of pain complete with its own exhaustion bill took first priority.

“Alright, first things first.” Ford took a breath, closed his eyes momentarily, and made his body obey him as he stood up.

The kids stilled, eyes widening more with every moment, ready to hang onto the next words he said with everything they had.

“Where’s your kitchen?”

□

The kitchen, and more importantly the fridge, was inside. It was full.

The house was big. It was empty.

Yet another bell went off in Ford’s head, and this time it was unmistakeable.

The most pressing facts:

  1. A tremendous crash had just resounded from right in front of this house and only the two six-year-olds inside had come out to investigate.
  2. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around.
  3. They’d said they wanted him to “stop” the crack in their wall. So what had it started doing?



“Where are your parents?” he asked them, stepping back out into the hall and glancing up and down it. Completely deserted.

From back inside the kitchen, the girl shrugged as she looked through the contents of the fridge, and the boy replied aloofly, “Don’t have parents,” as he stood on a chair to examine the cupboards.

Oh.

“You must have someone looking after you, though?” Ford pressed.

Two more unconcerned shrugs.

Absolutely nothing about this was looking good.

At least, until the girl returned victoriously from the fridge with approximately half a million Joules of energy in the form of sugar-infused snacks.

“Party!” she whooped, spreading out the various boxes and tubs on the table. There wasn’t even any room for her brother to put the plates out.

“How hungry are you?” The girl said, eyes searching him piercingly. He wouldn’t be surprised if she was gauging just how much of a dent he was going to put in their food stash.

“Not particularly,” Ford assured her. “I’m more tired than anything else. I just need some energy and I’ll be fine,”

“Energy? Nooooo problem!!” Suddenly enthusiastic, the girl became a whirlwind of activity as she gathered various ingredients, shoved them into a blender, blasted it for a few moments, and poured the pink, glittery, (be-dinosaur-ed?) contents into a glass for him with a look on her face akin to that of a mad scientist strapping down their latest subject to the operating table and seeing the lightning rods begin to spark.

“Mabel-juice!” The girl – Mabel, he presumed – proclaimed proudly.

Out of her field of view, the boy blanched at her creation. Ford made eye contact with him. Then he looked at Mabel’s eager expression and watched her excited little bobs up and down where she knelt on her chair. He looked back at her brother. The boy shook his head mutely. Ford reached out, took hold of the glass, and downed the bright concoction in one – avoiding the, yes, plastic dinosaurs.

Some sort of bomb went off on his tongue and if his insides were a car they would have been revving like he was going 120 in second gear.

He slowly lowered the glass.

“Did you like it?” asked Mabel excitedly.

“Mabel, I’m going to need a whole _pot_ of this,”

□

The boy’s name, as it turned out, was Mason, and he _was_ Mabel’s twin brother. Mason and Mabel were six years old, lived in a large house in Gravity Falls with no adults around, and were frustratingly vague when Ford tried to press the point about who was taking care of them. Otherwise, they were very friendly and happy and may have gotten him addicted to Mabel-juice, which, as long as it kept him awake and alert and made Mabel delighted to see him drink, he saw nothing wrong with.

Mason applied a band-aid decorated with a classic green alien face to the cut on his forehead. He smiled shyly when Ford thanked him.

They really were taking all this _very_ well.

And despite the illusion of normalcy around him… that was not a normal reaction.

Fortunately, Ford did not specialise in _normal._

“So, what’s your name? What do we call you?” Mason asked when the rest of the food had been packed away and they had settled at the table with some hot chocolate that Ford had made in return for the Mabel-juice pick-me-up.

“I’m Doctor P-”

“Ooh, you’re a doctor?” Enthused Mabel before he could finish.

“Yes,” Ford nodded. “Actually, I have twelve doctorates – none of them in medicine though, which in hindsight would definitely come in handy sometimes.”

Mason’s eyes had blown as wide as coins.

“Twelve?!” Mabel exclaimed. “That makes you like… a super duper smarty pants doctor! You’re like… _the_ doctor!”

“Are you an alien doctor? Or did you get them on Earth?” Mason asked.

“A bit of both,” laughed Ford.

“Why did you come here?”

“I like to look for weird stuff, and your planet has plenty – including a certain brilliant young chef like you-” he tapped Mabel playfully on the nose – “and a clever young investigator like you,” He tapped Mason’s nose as well. The actions earned him a very broad and crooked-toothed grin and a pleased if slightly bashful one.

“What planet are you from? I’ve got a book with them all in,” Mason informed him, growing bolder.

“Well, unless I’ve completely mistaken what century I’ve landed in, I doubt my planet will be in it. It’s called Gallifrey, and it’s a very long way from here,”

In awe, Mason mouthed the word _Gallifrey_ after him.

“Does everyone from your planet have six fingers?” he asked.

“Only the lucky ones,” Ford said easily, years of practice and experience among the much wilder and weirder universe allowing him to believe the sentence much more than his younger self had. “I’d say I’m still not as lucky as you and that birthmark though. Did you know that that particular star cluster hosts the most dazzling and renowned solar storm patterns in the galaxy?”

One of Mason’s hands automatically moved up to flatten the hair over his forehead before he registered the encouragement and sincerity in Ford’s voice, and lowered it again with his happiest smile yet. Suddenly wondering if he should give Mabel a compliment to even things out, Ford found she was entirely unconcerned by the imbalance, nudging her brother fondly with a whispered, “Told you it’s cool!”

There was a comfortable silence for a moment, and then Mabel asked, slurping her drink, “Why’d you crash?”

Ford opened his mouth to reply, and found that he had nothing to say.

 _Hmm. Suffering from memory loss._ That person-shaped hole in his mind…

“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. _Most likely temporary._ “However, I think you two are far more interesting than me,”

At the pair of doubtful expressions aimed at the alien that had just drunk all their Mabel-juice and flattened their shed with his spaceship, Ford nodded resolutely, not backing down.

“I’m certain of it. Of the three of us, who has had their home invaded by a strange man flying a shack _and_ had to patch him up and feed him all by themselves? Not me, that’s for sure. Well, except for one unfortunate Wednesday morning. Anyway, most people would have hosed me off the property, especially at this hour. You two are incredibly brave and capable, you know that? Your definition of ‘frightening’ is very different to everyone else’s,”

He watched them carefully.

“So that must be one heck of a scary crack in your wall,”

Like he’d flipped a switch, the comfortable atmosphere vanished and Mason and Mabel’s expressions dropped into something splintered and fragile.

□

“Hmm,” Ford said, staring at the crack.

 Mason and Mabel watched his examination carefully.

“This crack is certainly not a normal crack, you’re right,” he pronounced after a moment. The analyser he’d picked up several galaxies and/or decades ago was going haywire in his hand.

Hearing a muttered, “Well, duh,” from behind him, he looked back at the kids, standing by their shared dresser – and that was another thing. They shared a dresser, and a bedroom, in this generously-sized house of theirs (re: absent of any other humans). They might just be attached to each other, but… considering the day he was having, he was more inclined to believe the version of events in which things just didn’t add up.

“There’s a voice coming from it,” Mabel continued. “I thought it was fairies from the bushes on the other side of the wall, but me an’ Mason looked for them and couldn’t find any,”

“Well done of you to rule that out.” Ford nodded. “Fairies can cause trouble like that, although beware when you do investigate them – the danger of being hit by projectile vomit is surprisingly high.” He pressed an ear to the wall, right over the crack, and heard nothing but the pump of blood through his ears.

There was a tug on his coat. He looked down to find Mason offering him an empty glass of water – recently emptied, going by the puddle near the dresser.

“You gotta use this,” the boy said.

Ford pressed the rim of the glass against the wall, still looking at Mason. Then he listened at it.

 _“Prisoner Zero has escaped,”_ announced a loud, distant, robotic voice, reverberating faintly through the glass.

“Prisoner Zero has escaped,” said Mason, exactly in time with the repeated alert. He had clearly heard it enough to mimic the tempo perfectly. Ford slowly removed his ear from the glass and handed it back.

“It sounds like there’s a prison on the other side of this crack,” he mused. Endeavouring to appear more upbeat about the situation for the sake of Mason and Mabel’s unsettled faces, he launched into an explanation. “Not on the other side of this wall, though. This crack isn’t in the wall, this crack is in _everything,_ ”

“Like… the air?” asked Mason, puzzled.

“The air, the wall, the space between the electrons of all those atoms. This crack,” he gestured, “is through time and space _itself_ – and for some reason it has appeared in your bedroom,”

“Cool. How do we close it?” Mabel said immediately. Well, he supposed he couldn’t expect her to be enthused about it after however long it had been stressing her out for. Maybe she’d be more impressed when she was older – for now, at least Mason was trying to be excited, but Ford suspected that was more due to the possibility of making it go away.

 “Well, it wasn’t us that made it – was it?” The six-year-olds shook their heads. “Good. You should probably be supervised if you play with dimensional tech.” _Not to mention in your general daily lives._ “So hopefully it was the prison on the other side. I expect they’ll close it once they realise it’s there – no one likes draughts. So,” Ford marched a few steps away from the wall to where the kids were, and about-turned, taking their hands. “We just have to draw some attention to it,”

“How?” asked Mabel, grinning and bouncing up and down a little in eagerness.

“By making some noise; knocking usually works.” And with that, Ford slammed his boot against the wall with a mighty bang.

The kids looked at each other, and began screaming nonsense, interspersed with enthusiastic but random attacks on the plaster of questionable innocence in order to attract the attention of whatever was on the other side. While they did seem all too happy to unleash themselves upon it, Ford pulled them back after the listening-glass shattered passionately against first it, and then the floor.

The crack split wide open.

Bright white light shone out, clearing to reveal a dark void housing indistinct shapes beyond. They looked like bars.

_“PRISONER ZERO HAS ESCAPED. PRISONER ZERO HAS ESCAPED,”_

Mason and Mabel were clutching his hands equally tightly. He was losing circulation in them. The loud tones, harsh tones, robotic tones of some sort of alert system blared.

A massive eyeball whipped over the crack, the icy blue iris swivelling to take all three of them in.

_“PRISONER ZERO HAS ESCAPED,”_

The crack snapped closed.

After a moment, Ford stepped closer to the wall, tugging the twins forward when they didn’t want to let go of his hands.

The crack had disappeared.

“It’s gone!” Mabel cheered, and she and her brother whooped and let go, jumping and dancing ecstatically around the room. Ford remained staring at the wall.

“It’sgoneit’sgoneit’sgoneit’sgone!”

 _So it did lead to a prison,_ Ford thought, the trickle of dread that had been winding its way through him ever since entering the house becoming more of a shower. _And they’re on the search for a missing prisoner._

It occurred to him to wonder about the realistic number of ways such an obviously high-security, heavily fortified jail could allow for a prison break.

It occurred to him to wonder where the prisoner could have escaped _to._

With a recently-opened crack in time and space leading out of the prison suddenly available.

“Mason? Mabel?” he said, raising his voice above their chants, having difficulty looking away from the now-closed – now _locked_ – wall.

“Yeah?” they chorused.

“How about you take me on a tour of your house now?”

□

“And here’s another bedroom, and here’s another one, and _another_ one – oh, no that’s just a closet…”

Nothing, nothing, nothing! There was nothing to suggest anything else in the house was out of the ordinary – except for _everything!_ So many empty rooms, never filled, never lived in, the only signs of something existing and living in the house those left by the children currently dragging him through the halls. On the one hand, for a very specific reason, that was good, but on the other hand, for various obvious reasons, it wasn’t.

“And that’s about it for this floor…”

“Down the stairs!”

Everywhere he looked, there was a frightening _absence_ of-

…everywhere… he… looked…

Slowly, bringing the children’s rushed progression through the house to a halt, he turned his head, eyes sliding over to the side first, and looked through his peripherals at the hall of doors he’d just toured through.

He saw something new that had always been there.

“Whatcha looking at?” asked Mabel brightly, swinging his hand.

“I’m not entirely…” he began.

The deep, echoing ring of a bell filtered through their surroundings. Ford’s head snapped up, and his heart started to beat faster.

“Oh no,”

He sprinted outside, the twins on his heels, spouting questions.

“It’s the TARDIS-”

“You mean the Mystery Shack?” corrected Mason.

“Yes, the engines are phasing!” Ford explained rapidly as they ran for the still smoking and flaming husk of his ship – _wow,_ he hoped it was still functional enough to repair itself…

“I need to take it to a safe space and let it burn off the excess energy or-”

“Or it’ll explode the house?”

“And the tectonic plate below us,” agreed Ford, stopping the kids before they ran up the veranda after him and fishing his key out of his pocket. He turned back to them before he opened the door. “Stay here, keep together, I’ll be back in a few seconds.” Their mouths opened. “It’s a time machine too, I’ll explain later,” Their mouths stayed open. “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine, and I’ll be back before you know it-”

Mason interrupted his deluge of jabbering.

“That’s what people always say,”

Ford looked up from struggling with his key.

“They always say they’ll be back,” Mason repeated, resigned and quiet. Mabel wasn’t smiling anymore.

“And I mean it,” said Ford, looking them firmly in the eyes. He smiled at them briefly with as small an amount of panic as he could currently muster, and saw them start to smile hopefully back. “Count the seconds!” He called, and dived through the doorway.

Two was what he was aiming for. Three at the latest.

□

He was shouting before he made it out of the console room, which was full of black clouds of striking resemblance to those inside the crystal ball of a fortune teller living on a volcano. Fires were still burning all over the armchair. The axolotl was lucky his tank’s crash protection mechanism still worked.

“Alright! The engines are stabilised!” Ford ran, coughing, and pulled open the door. “How many seconds did you make it, kids? I’m sorry, it was longer than I meant it to be – navigation’s not doing too well,” The TARDIS belched smoke behind him. “But I’m back now, so-”

It was daylight.

He was fairly sure it had been near midnight when he left.

Something dropped in his stomach.

“Kids?!” He shouted to an empty front garden. It was silent. He broke into a run for the front door.

He had _not_ left them alone in the house, alone in _this_ house, overnight, he had not left them alone for hours when he had _seen_ how wrong everything was here, when he had _seen_ what was inside-

“KIDS!”

The front door burst open under his weight.

“Mason! Mabel!” He thundered down the hall, did a double take and glared fearsomely at what he saw, and ran for their bedroom door.

“Wake up, I’m getting you out of here right now – not via TAR- I mean, Mystery Shack, but maybe there’s a burger place down the street somewhere or in the next… country. Kids! Are you in here?”

There was a yell from behind him and running footsteps too heavy to be a six-year-old’s and Ford got a hand on his gun and pain exploded on the back of his head and everything went dark.

□

“Okay, Operation Sleepwalker is a-go,” Mabel muttered, keeping a grimly determined watch on the entrance of the hospital from her concealed position in the bushes across the road. They were prickly, but only if she moved, so simple solution. Plus, it was just their way of showing affection; she was fine with it.

She eased her foot into a more comfortable position under her and got stabbed by about a million tiny thorns.

“Stop loving me so much!” she hissed.

The rosebush stabbed her again.

“Oh, you…”

This waiting was getting pretty boring. Not to mention, various parts of her were going numb. The things she did for the sake of the mission…

_“Mabel!”_

She jumped and fumbled for the walkie-talkie in her pocket as another burst of static erupted from it.

_“Mabel, you need to get back here!”_

“What? I can’t do that! I’m on a _mission!_ ” she protested.

 _“Who cares about that anymore!”_ Her brother sounded unusually panicked. _“It’s the Doctor! Or someone who looks_ a lot _like him – he’s even got the trenchcoat and the red sweater and the weird strap thing!”_

That piqued her attention in a big way, but then suspicion poked at her. Sure. He was _back._ Right.

“What do you mean you _think_ he’s back?”

The voice on the other end of the line cracked in mingled guilt and stress. _“I may have hit him in the head with a baseball bat, which knocked him out before he could say anything. Now I’ve handcuffed him to the radiator – but I think it was justified!”_

“What the heck man! What’d you do that for?!”

_“He broke into our house, Mabel! What was I supposed to do? And besides, I heard a clang!”_

“What do you mean ‘a clang’?”

_“A clang! Like when you hit a pot with a spoon! It sounded like that when I hit him in the head with the baseball bat!”_

“You think he has a pot for a head?”

 _“I_ did _think he was a robot simulant planted here to kill and/or prank us actually, but we can’t discount that theory either! No trustworthy person has a head that clangs when you knock them out with a baseball bat! Did I mention that? I did, didn’t I? I knocked him out with a baseball bat!”_

“I think you’re fixating a little now,”

_“You might be right. You have to get back here!”_

A car pulled into the staff parking area of the hospital. Mabel’s eyes widened.

“No can do. She’s just arrived and I need to confront her! Again. Anyway, it sounds like you’ve got the situation back there aaaaalllll under control, so good luck! I’m switching this off now,”

 _“No! No, I do_ not _have this under control! What if he wakes up? What should I do? Knock him out again?”_

“Yeah! Or interrogate him,” Mabel suggested. “We don’t want a pothead robot simulant dressed like the Doctor going around killing and/or pranking us! Especially when you’ve just attacked him with a baseball bat. Bye.” She turned the walkie-talkie off amidst her brother’s frantic objections and shoved it back in her pocket. Then she exploded out of the bushes in a flurry of petals and leaves and a little bit of blood and raced over to the physician about to enter the building.

“AHA! I’ve caught you now, Zombifier!” She cried, pointing an accusatory finger right into the culprit’s face.

Doctor Ramsen looked surprised at her sudden appearance, then annoyed - as any crook would at being trapped! The way her eyes rolled were a clear sign of a guilty conscience!

“Mabel-” she started impatiently.

“The patients in your coma ward, are they or are they not compelled to get up at random hours of the day and night and walk around town completely conscious?”

“They are not,” said Doctor Ramsen, distinctly unamused.

“Still going with that story, huh? Well, you’ll be left with no legs to stand on today, you… legless… villain!”

“Mabel, you and your brother have had fun with this for the last few weeks, but I’m getting very tired of it now-”

“Because today I have _proof_ of your dastardly insomniac deeds! Right here! Deny them if you dare!”

“I do. Now I want you to stop with this nonsense and go _home_ , right now,”

“No matter how hard you try, you can’t squirm out of it this time-”

“MABEL!” Shouted Doctor Ramsen. Mabel’s voice died in her throat. “Do I need to call your uncle? _Again?”_

“…No,” Mabel said after a moment.

“Good. Now go home, and enjoy your weekend _without_ harassing anyone in this hospital please. Off you go.” She turned and walked through the hospital entrance, leaving Mabel frustrated and fighting off instinctive hot red clouds of shame. She didn’t have anything to be ashamed of! She was helping uncover the mysteries of this town, unlike everyone else who seemed content to just be complicit in them…

A strange thought occurred to her.

Maybe Doctor Ramsen _wasn’t_ the root of the problem. What if it really _was_ something else? She should call Soos and ask him to pretty please with sugar on top use his status as a nurse to do some more recon work on the coma patients when his shift came on. His answer was always the same: no patients were missing, everyone was unconscious in their beds, as usual…

She looked down at the picture on her phone that she had been brandishing at Doctor Ramsen.

On it, a lady dressed for the coma ward was depicted wandering down the street.

□

Ford jerked awake. This was difficult, due to the cuffs restraining his right wrist.

He was slumped at the end of the hallway against a thankfully-turned-off radiator. Down the hall, the nightmare faced him.

_You left them here all night…_

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” Demanded a voice.

A boy in a blue and white hat was standing nearby, pointing a baseball bat at him with false bravado. Ford’s head twinged in recognition.

“Who are _you_ and what are _you_ doing here?” He demanded right back, which seemed to throw the kid even more off-balance than he already was. How old was he? Twelve? Thirteen? Where the hell had he come from? Could he be a neighbour, perhaps?

“I- I’m Dipper,” the boy stammered out and then winced, like he hadn’t meant to let that slip.

“And what are you doing here?”

“Uh, I’m investigating some zom- I mean, coma patients… it’s a long story… but I needed to pick up my camera.” He gestured to the bag at his feet, which Ford could see through the open top was indeed holding a video camera. Ford’s gaze flicked back up to him, and he shifted uneasily. _Definitely hiding something,_ Ford surmised, but he couldn’t focus on it now.

“I’m Stanford,” He introduced himself in an attempt to build some rapport. The boy’s eyes narrowed. _Forget it!_ “Now, where are the children that live here? A boy and a girl, Mason and Mabel, where are they?”

The boy frowned, opening and closing his mouth, clearly trying to work out when exactly the roles of interrogator and interrogatee had reversed. There was no time for this, not anymore. He had to get everyone out of this house _pronto_ before his suspicions were confirmed. The view of the hallway behind Dipper seemed to loom larger.

“Kid! Just answer the question! This house is dangerous, and we need to get far away from it _now!_ ”

“Dangerous?” Dipper looked alarmed. _Finally_ , he was getting through.

“ _Extremely,_ and even more so if you don’t let me out of these cuffs right this minute!” He pulled on them for good measure, but Dipper was looking over his shoulder, down the hallway, following the line of sight which Ford’s gaze had been flickering along for some time.

“What’s wrong with it?” He asked, looking back at Ford.

_No time! It’s been too long already!_

“ _The kids.”_ Ford stressed. “Where are Mabel and Mason?”

Dipper was looking over his shoulder again, forehead creased. “Huh? They… um… haven’t been here for a while…” he answered vaguely.

Ford’s insides froze solid.

“What?”

_He hadn’t been that long, he was only out by about six hours, he hadn’t been that long!_

“What do you mean?”

_Nothing had happened to them before he arrived, so why would anything have happened to them since?_

“Dipper, what do you mean? How long is a ‘while’?”

The boy turned back to him, shaking his head a little, and appearing to have reclaimed some of his authority.

“Alright, that’s enough questions. What are you _really_ doing here, Doctor ‘Stanford’?” The quotation marks thunked into place around Ford’s name. “Are you some sort of robot _imposter-_ ” and there was a swell of righteous anger in that word – “here to invade us? To take us all prisoner? To kill us? To… _prank us?!_ Answer me, pothead!”

Ford stared at him for a moment before his heart resumed its heavy beating of a tattoo against his ribs and the frustration and fear all came back.

“ _What_ in the name of- didn’t you hear me? This place is dangerous and we need to leave now!”

“Yeah, I’d say so! Some crazy guy just broke in and ran around yelling like he owns the place, and now he keeps trying to convince me to let him keep doing it!”

Ford would probably concede that point at any other time, but it was far too late to start rationalising with the kid.

_Make him understand, make him understand!_

“How many doors are in this hallway? Tell me, right now,”

Glaring uncomprehendingly, Dipper must have realised Ford was far too stubborn to allow him to direct the conversation because he sighed impatiently and gestured around them at each door without looking.

“Five. One, two, three, four, five-”

“Six,”

Dipper stopped.

“Look behind you,” Ford instructed. Dipper didn’t move, but he wasn’t contradicting his count. “Look behind you. You _know_ there’s something wrong, don’t you? Something there, in the corner of your eye…”

□

Slowly, Dipper turned his head. His eyes strained to look into the area normally guarded by his peripherals. He faced the end of the hallway.

_No way…_

“Why haven’t I seen that before?” He breathed. There was a door. Door number six, sitting at the end of the hallway as innocently as a grenade. His heart beat faster. There was a whole other room in the house. A whole other room. How could he not have noticed?

“There’s a perception filter around it, tricking you into looking away, convincing your brain into skipping over it every time your eyes cross it,” The fake’s voice answered from behind him. Dipper took a step towards it, and another.

“No, stay away from it, stay back!” The fake ordered. “That perception filter was _put_ there by something so it could hide, so it could stay here without being noticed!”

A whole other person had been _living_ in his house? All this time?

The was a clinking and a clattering as the imposter tried to get free again. Dipper’s feet were still being drawn onwards like they were magnetised to the mystery at the end of the corridor.

That was a seriously creepy thought. There was someone else in the house with them? There had _been_ someone else in the house with them this entire time? No, wait…

The guy hadn’t said someone, he’d said some _thing…_

On the other hand, they hadn’t been making much of a nuisance of themself. At least he didn’t have to do dishes for them as well.

His hand closed around the doorknob.

“Dipper!”

The door swung open easily at his touch. Not a squeak of the hinges. Not a stick in the movement.

It was accustomed to being opened and shut.

A particularly vicious _clank_ sounded, along with some swear words that Dipper conscientiously edited out from his mind.

“Why do you even _have_ handcuffs?!” The fake shouted.

“They’re my uncle’s,” Dipper answered vaguely, looking around the new room that was so, so _old._ It hadn’t been maintained along with the rest of the house over the years. It was bare, with peeling wallpaper and a creaky, bare wooden floor. Not so much as some blankets, or a table, or any furnishings at all were inside – although with the way Dipper was already struggling to keep the waves of panic at bay, he wasn’t sure he could have handled any irrefutable evidence that someone had been insidiously and possibly even ubiquitously part of his life since…

“Why does your uncle have handcuffs?” The voice echoed frustratedly back from out in the hall.

“No idea…” Dipper mumbled, still taking in the room. It was silent and still, the floor housing a fine layer of dust. There was nothing living in the slightest. Not even bugs.

“Dipper?” There was a tinge of worry in Stanf- in the imposter’s voice. He mustn’t have heard his answer.

Dipper shook himself.

“There’s no one here,” he called out loudly. “It’s empty,”

“How do you know?”

What? How did he know if it was empty? What, like he didn’t have eyes? Jeez, was this guy demanding. How hard was it to tell if a room was occupied or not?

“Because-” Dipper floundered helplessly for a moment. “Because I can’t see anyone!”

There was silence. His own words hovered in the air.

_Tricking you into looking away, convincing your brain into skipping over it every time your eyes cross it…_

_Something there, in the corner of your eye…_

Dipper swallowed with a dry throat.

“Dipper, get out of there,”

He turned his head, examining the four walls from his position in the centre. Nothing left, nothing right…

“Don’t look for it, just come away,”

He was very conscious that he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head.

“Dipper!”

And whichever way he turned, his back was always to something.

He looked around again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. His breaths filled his ears and his pulse filled his head.

He slowly made to look to the left… and whipped around to the right.

 _TEETH._ Huge fanged _TEETH._ Translucent skin covering a reptilian, snakelike head and a long neck or body or whatever winding up to the ceiling and it opened its mouth wide and hissed at him, the _TEETH_ impossibly huge.

Dipper screamed and hit it with the baseball bat. Then he _ran._

Two steps into the hallway, slamming the door behind him for all the good that would do against huge freaking monstrous _FANGS,_ two steps out and he ran into the Doctor, who had been pelting towards him. His whole body jarred with the collision and he went flying backwards-

-would have gone flying backwards if the Doctor hadn’t caught him, grabbed him, lifted him bodily off the ground and _run_ for the front door, the handcuffs dangling from his right wrist knocking Dipper’s hat askew on the way.

Sunshine filled the world and kicked his brain back into gear and he started struggling to be put down. Most of the way across the front yard, the D- the imposter abruptly stopped and Dipper seized the chance, wriggling out of the guy’s grip, his feet thudding into the grass.

“We’ve been living with a _monster_ this _entire time!_ ” He half yelled half gasped, trying to suck air into his aching lungs and expel it at the same time with as much success as could be expected. His hand leapt for his walkie-talkie – he needed to tell Mabel, he needed to talk to her, he needed to find her and then they’d go find Stan together- but it was missing, left behind in the bag with his camera-

“There’s a shed in this yard,” said Stanford.

“What?!” said Dipper wildly. “What?! Yeah there’s a shed! And an ALIEN in the house back there, in case you somehow missed it!”

“It’s old – it’s _years_ old,” Stanford said in disbelief, looking at the wooden building like it held another translucent reptilian being.

“So? Let’s go! We need to get out of here!”

“No, you don’t understand – there can’t be a shed here, I destroyed it when I crashed…”

Desperately trying to pull himself together enough for both their snakes- their sakes before the alien came out and ate them both, Dipper took a deep breath and grabbed the man’s trenchcoated arm, tugging it – uselessly as it turned out. If Stanford didn’t want to move, he didn’t move, apparently.

“Look, it’s great that you admire my uncle’s shed-making skills so much-”

“Your uncle? He made this? Who is he?” Stanford said sharply.

Dipper waved his arms in a general gesture of franticness, helplessness, and lack of information or care, knocking his hat even more out of place. “He’s- he’s Stan! He’s my uncle! Showed up not long after-”

“How old is it? How old is that shed?”

Dipper ripped his hat off. “I don’t know! How many seconds is it since you told us to wait for you?!”

Stanford froze.

□

How had he missed it?

The boy’s fringe and fluffy hair sprang up out of hat-pressed flatness. That vivid red birthmark with the incredible likeness to the Big Dipper – how had he _missed_ it? – glared out at him, as did a pair of fierce brown eyes.

“We need to go,” Dipper insisted, tugging on his arm again. Ford pulled himself together.

“TARDIS,” he said.

“You mean Mystery Shack,” Dipper corrected.

“Right.” He looked around for where he’d landed this time – which turned out to be on the property line, one corner of the house edging onto the road. Part of the fence had been obliterated, and Ford was forced to admit that sometimes its exterior, while relatively small, was still rather large to find parking spaces for.

As they turned to it, shutters rolled down inside the windows, the door locked audibly, and the sound of some sort of contained explosion went off inside.

“Ah,” said Ford. “Maybe not until it’s repaired itself,”

Dipper gasped and he whipped around to face what could now be comfortably called the _haunted_ house.

“Zombie,” the boy said in a tight voice.

There was a man in a hospital gown standing in the doorway. He opened his mouth and snarled with an impossible number of humongous and needle-like teeth. Dipper’s body seemed to have completely locked up beside him.

“Well,” Ford said lightly. “On the bright side, we know that Prisoner Zero is also a shapeshifter,”

“That’s a bright side?”

“Would you rather we not know?” He grabbed Dipper’s hand. “Run!”

Their feet thudded on pavement, across grass, on pavement again. Houses, streets, cars flashed past. They weren’t being pursued. They weren’t being _visibly_ pursued. Dipper was having trouble keeping up. Ford only stopped when a loud scream of feedback rang out of an ice cream van’s loudspeaker by the side of a park.

Wheezing and coughing, Dipper was bent double trying to take in air. That didn’t stop him from trying to make his lungs obey him so he could voice all his questions as soon as possible, that investigative curiosity he’d had as a younger child only having grown since. Good God, he’d been _six_ five minutes ago…

“Prisoner Zero’s been in our _house?_ ”

“Yes – and they’ve not been idle. To take a form like that they’d need to develop a psychic link with a host,” The ice cream van had got the feedback under control, but still seemed to be having some technical problems.

“Where’s your sister?” Questioned Ford. “Is she alright? Didn’t you say something about coma patients earlier?”

Dipper straightened up and started breathing evenly again. “Yeah, she’s fine, she’s at the hospital. We keep seeing patients from the coma ward walking around town, so-” He stopped, eyes widening. “ _They’ve_ been Prisoner Zero?” He stopped again, his head cocked.

“What is it?” Ford knew before he’d finished the question.

_“-incinerated. Repeat. Prisoner Zero will-”_

“No way,” Dipper murmured disbelievingly. A harsh, robotic, and above all _familiar_ loud voice was sounding over the ice cream van’s loudspeakers.

_“-eject the human residence, or-”_

It wasn’t just the loudspeakers. Twenty feet away, along the jogging track, a woman was staring at her earbuds strangely. On the other side of the park a teenager’s stereo was blaring the same robotic message. Through the curtains of someone’s living room, Ford could see a large blue eyeball swivelling back and forth on a television screen.

_“-residence will be-”_

Someone in the park shouted, pointing up at the sky. Ford and Dipper and everyone within sight were suddenly looking upwards in fear, in confusion, in curiosity, in panic, as the sun shimmered and dulled to an orangey-yellow and people could watch it without having to avert their eyes in pain. Everyone gaped at the incomprehensible sight.

Everyone except someone in a little corner of the park, who looked very familiar to Ford now that he was thinking along the right lines.

He cleared the fence posts in one leap.

“Mabel!”

Ford skidded to a halt in front of her and spent a second trying to adjust to how similar and different she was now compared to then – still in a wonderfully bright sweater, taller now obviously, hair longer, an expression a lot more shocked-looking than it used to be when she looked at him, but she was alright – they were both alright. (Dipper came to a stop by crashing into his sister, legs still not fully under his control after such a long run). Ford didn’t know how much the uncertainty of not knowing for sure what had happened had been stressing him out until he felt it vanish upon seeing the twins side-by side, if a little scared, again. So many things were going wrong today, but at least this was mostly okay.

“IMPOSTER!” Yelled Mabel, recovering her balance both physically and emotionally and brandishing a finger at him. She had braces now.

“No, no, I swear Mabel, it’s me, I’m back,” Ford said quickly, waving his hands placatingly. “The T- uh, the Mystery Shack’s navigation was fairly… melted and it clearly had a hard time trying to find the right time again, I’m so sorry. But I’m back now. Right, Dipper?”

Dipper was silent. He looked away from Ford’s stare.

“What? Dipper? You really don’t believe it’s me?” It didn’t seem possible, not after all that had just happened. And yet here the boy was, looking at him now that he had a moment to breathe with just as much unwillingness to believe, to hope that it was really Ford, and that he was really back.

“You said your name was Stanford,” He said, crossing his arms.

“That _is_ my name!”

“No it isn’t,” Mabel said stubbornly. “That’s some sort of- of weird robot name you came up with because you’re a weird robot imposter!”

“Isn’t your uncle’s name Stan? It’s not that weird,” Frowned Ford.

“Not the point! The Doctor didn’t have a name! He was just the Doctor, mister, which you’d _know_ if you _were_ the Doctor!” She folded her arms too, confident that she’d trapped him. Ford suddenly felt like those few times Dipper had looked at him back at the house – like something was going on that was so obvious he didn’t know where to begin explaining it.

“Of course I have a name!” He burst out. “I never told you it because you interrupted me when I tried!”

A thoughtful expression crossed Mabel’s face. “Oh yeah, that did happen… and that does explain it.” Then she turned hard again, and Ford’s heart sank. “But not all of it! You never came back!”

“And why would you now?” Her brother chimed in, equally distrustful.

“I’ve already-” Ford pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to calm the steadily encroaching tension making its way over him via the strange sun and the robotic message and Prisoner Zero and the two kids in front of him who… who he’d _left_ when they didn’t have anyone else, and it didn’t matter that they hadn’t been alone for long before their uncle apparently showed up – he’d still left them, and broken their trust as easily as they’d given it, and now they were no longer small with unguarded hearts.

“Do you know how many psychiatrists Stan practically had to beat off with a stick?”

“Or how many seconds there are in six years? ‘Cause we do,”

Ford knelt down. Their faces were set, but at least now they had to look at him.

“I know you don’t want to trust me again,” he told them, “but you _know_ it’s me. You know it, and I _am_ back now, and I promise I can still help. So for now,” He stuck out both his hands to them. Hands that he was fairly sure they wouldn’t have seen many like in this small town, and hands which he was certain they remembered from his first visit. Dipper and Mabel looked back and forth between them and his face. Ford introduced himself anew.

“I’m Doctor Stanford Pines. I have twelve PhDs from various corners of the universe, I fly a Mystery Shack through time and space, and I’d like your help in solving this current crisis,”

They stared at his six fingers, and the still-warm soot on his jacket, and the traces of glittery dinosaur Mabel juice on his sleeves.

“Please,” he implored them. “There’s no one better suited to the task, or who I’d rather have,”

Hesitantly, with equal expressions that told him that maybe their hearts weren’t too guarded against him just yet, they shook his hands.

“Alright,” Dipper said.

“We’re really the only people who’ll have any hope of saving us anyway,” shrugged Mabel, and Ford laughed.

“But first, _what_ is happening to the sun?” demanded Dipper.

_“-residence, or the human residence will-”_

“And the weird broadcast,” Mabel added.

Ford stood up. “Nothing good, I’m afraid.” He pulled his analyser out of his pocket – noting with some exuberance that Dipper and Mabel’s eyes widened as they recognised it – and aimed it at the sky. After a moment, a little hologram of something that looked like a snowflake at first glance blinked up on it.

“Allow me to introduce Prisoner Zero’s cell wardens – the Atraxi.” The spiky, delicate looking spaceship spun in place, a super-sized blue eyeball in the centre. “There’s currently a fleet of them surrounding the planet, searching for Prisoner Zero,”

“Well that’s good, isn’t it?” asked Mabel. “They’ll find them and take them away-”

“-and we won’t have to worry about some creepy alien hiding in our house,” added Dipper.

“What?”

“Oh yeah, it’s horror movie kind of stuff. I’ll tell you about it later,”

“The fact that they want to take Prisoner Zero away? Yes, that is good,” Ford informed them. “What they’re threatening to do? Not so much,”

“What are they threatening to do?” frowned Mabel. “It’s just looks like they’re floating around up there,”

On cue, the teenager nearby pressed the wrong thing on his stereo and the most certainly planet-wide broadcast boomed out at full volume.

_“PRISONER ZERO WILL EJECT THE HUMAN RESIDENCE, OR THE HUMAN RESIDENCE WILL BE INCINERATED. REPEAT. PRISONER ZERO WILL EJECT THE HUMAN RESIDENCE, OR THE HUMAN RESIDENCE WILL BE INCINERATED,”_

Dipper blanched. “The human residence… as in, ‘Earth’?”

“Exactly,” confirmed Ford. “So we need to find Prisoner Zero, who’ll be needing to stay close to any subjects of their psychic link in order to maintain their disguise,”

“The coma patients!” Realised Dipper.

“I feel like I’ve missed a _lot,_ ” Mabel complained.

“We need to get into the hospital!”

“Now _that_ I understand!” She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “Soos to the rescue! He’s on his shift right now!”

“Alright! We can do this! Is there anything else?” Dipper asked Ford eagerly.

“I’ll need a computer-”

“Wendy has one! She’s right over there!”

“How convenient!” Ford praised.

“So that’s it, right? You do whatever you need to do with the computer, then we’ll go to the hospital and wrassle with an alien, and then we call the Atraxi and they can take Prisoner Zero away and _not_ incinerate us, and everything will be fine!” Mabel cheered, putting her hands on her hips and huffing out a relieved sigh. “Simple! And it’s not even like there’s a twenty-four-hour time limit, like in the movies!” She laughed.

Ford’s stomach dropped at her innocent statement, and his mood change did not go unnoticed by the twins.

“ _What?_ There _is_ a time limit?” Mabel said in some distress.

Reluctantly, Ford admitted, “Well, the Atraxi have technically already started the incineration process,”

“They’ve _what?_ ” Shouted Dipper.

“Force-field in the upper atmosphere in order to contain the explosion,” Ford said, waving his hand at the diluted sun.

“So how long do we have?” Mabel said, considerably more nervously.

And this is what he’d _really_ have wanted to avoid telling them.

“Considering the mass of the planet, the density of the core, and the power needed to charge up a sufficient fusion blast… about twenty minutes,”

Mabel looked like her voice was being strangled in its formation. Dipper was bending over double and taking in whooping great breaths again. Ford decided that he wouldn’t mention how it was likely closer to fifteen now, after how long they’d been talking for.

Dipper straightened up again. “But you can still do it, right? You’ve had worse odds before, or something?” he said desperately. Mabel turned to him with equal expectancy.

With great reassurance, Ford placed a hand on each of their heads and ruffled their hair gently.

“Not really. This pretty bad. But with you two helping, things should be much easier! Now, which one is Wendy?”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I know, there's quite a few mysteries and Doctor Who --> Gravity Falls translational things that I should work out in a later story of the same AU... I do have plans to eventually do another of these, once I figure out a plot that will address them all.
> 
> I have a tumblr(s):  
> a-mad-scientists-writing  
> a-mad-scientist-approaches  
> If you wanna swing by.


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